


We Are, Without Names, Being

by Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor (orphan_account)



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Community: happybertidays, Crossover, M/M, Memory Alteration, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 17:45:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the bridge, they try to remember. And live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are, Without Names, Being

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArianneMaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArianneMaya/gifts).



> Originally for arianne_maya for Happy Bertidays on DW! Glad you enjoyed, dear!!
> 
> This is a semi-crossover of Adam Lambert's music video "Never Close Our Eyes" with Ayn Rand's _Anthem_ , or more correctly, "how I think _Anthem_ might have gone in a world where science went insane instead of being totally wiped out." It also owes a couple of its grace notes to the Matched trilogy, by Alli Condie.
> 
> Many thanks to Higuchimon for the beta!

"Solidarity 7-4512, you have been found guilty of the crime of engaging in that act the Other Ones call 'dancing'. Do you deny it?"

I look up into the pale brown eyes of a man I was scrubbing a bridge next to, not so many hours ago; in this place everyone is equally capable of being accused, or accuser.

Everyone is equal. _All Are Equal, All Are With Purpose_ is the legend over the door into the Dispensary, and until this morning I had no idea what kind of hell it actually implied.

Not until he threw down his brush and stood up on the bridge, the one with the strange light eyes and dark hair.

The real Other One. 

Philanthropy 9-6163.

_Adam._

The name doesn't sound familiar except in some part of the middle of my brain where it does, where I feel like maybe I remember some other time we stood together and moved in certain ways, hips and arms and legs and hands all moving in free patterns and unprescribed ways, numb at first and then, then as we moved, as we _ran_ . . . . 

"No."

I hear a gasp. They all expect me to say yes, to tell them I was misled, to place blame. But for the first time in—how long? I don't know—there hasn't been a tray of pills, vitamins and nutrients and caplets full of artificial sleep, and my head feels—

_like coming up from way down on the bottom of the pool, when you break the surface and need to breathe._

_What is a pool?_

There's a murmur and I look up, and there he is, standing across the room, eyes staring blankly at nothing, beautiful pale blue gone dark.

There's a little plastic holder taped to his arm where they can put the needle back in, if they need to; the needle they used when he clamped his mouth shut and tossed his head and bit the one person stupid enough to try to pry his teeth open.

I could hear him screaming when they put it in.

_Adam is what he called himself when he screamed._

Yes; yes, that sounds right, that space in my head not filled with pills bringing up—

_memories_

All right, memories, there's a word for those scenes from the past distant and so close. 

"What do you have to say for yourself, Philanthropy 9-6163?"

He opens his mouth and what comes out is _wrong_ , wrong in ways I can't define

_except he's not supposed to sound like this he sings his life he sings_

_what is singing?_

except that his voice is _flat_ , flat and empty, and the man on the bridge had a voice that expressed so much, said everything important in just a few syllables, that man who looked like this man but _isn't_ , and as he talks in his new flat voice about how he conspired to overthrow the Society and introduce subversive behaviour I understand why:

These aren't his words. 

It's a script, something they fed him while their drugs poured into his veins, and suddenly it all comes back.

_Your name is Adam, and we were friends, once, long ago. How long? Don't know. Can't say. But you were a singer, you made your living making people feel alive, and I was one of them. I danced for you. I made people feel alive, too. And somehow we ended up here . . . where is here?_

Here is a place we need to get out of. That much I know, and I'm thinking so hard I almost miss five important words:

_Death by flogging at dawn._

"I accept my punishment," he says, in that same not-him voice, and I should break out of the hands holding me and run across the room, throw us both through a window and onto the grass, but when I open my mouth all that comes out is a quiet little grunt of protest.

_That's okay. Stay quiet. Don't make them notice you._

But I can't run and leave him, not when I remember . . . 

No. 

There's another way. And it means not reminding them what they forgot.

\------------------------

"Adam," I murmur, and he rolls over, eyes half-open and unresponsive. They drugged him again before leaving him to sleep. I call his name again, softly, and when there's no response I look out his door before slinging his arm over my shoulders and hauling him off his pallet.

We're almost to the outside door and not a guard in sight; most people here don't think of things like running away. Just work, and the tasks the lasers assign us each day. 

And that's when he squirms, and rubs his face sleepily against my shoulder, and looks first up and then down at me, confused.

"I'm supposed to stay in my room," he says, and I think about breaking and running and then I decide maybe I can turn their advantage around on them, use it to help us, instead.

"Not anymore," I tell him. "They changed orders while you were asleep. We're supposed to head into the desert."

" . . . des . . . ert?" he asks, slurring the word a little like he's going under again, and I step as hard as I can on his foot.

"Don't you dare fall asleep on me, if we don't go we'll be punished."

"We'll die out there."

"That's what they're hoping," I answer, and what I hope is that it won't be true. I don't remember much from before, but I remember that deserts mean lots of heat and little water, and I don't know how to find us anything but a little bit of food—swiped off the doorsteps of Officials—and a couple of containers labelled MULTIVIT MALE that I hope mean "multivitamin" and don't have anything else mixed in. 

"Then I accept my punishment," he says, and I bite hard on my tongue not to scream at him and ask what changed, what made him not the man dancing against the fence anymore. 

I don't have to ask. I know.

We walk to the fence at the edge of the city, and I reach for the gate, braced for an alarm. Then I—

_laugh? Is this laughter?_

because the gate isn't even secured; the padlock is hanging open and when I slide the bar through the hasp the whole thing swings wide. I pull it shut behind us and rethread it.

Adam reaches for my hand as we look out at dusty plants I think I used to know the names of.

I wrap my fingers around his, and squeeze.

\---------------------------

"We weren't supposed to remember. I think I got a faulty batch."

I turn my head, look to the left. Adam is sipping from one of the water bottles I got off someone's step as we marched out of the Facility. There isn't a whole lot left; I'm starting to be afraid we're going to run out before we find somewhere habitable. There was a lake awhile back and we refilled the two empties we had, but even they, with their vaguely fishy taste, are going dry. 

"What do you mean, faulty batch?"

"The day I stood up," he says, and I reach across the floor of the cave for his hand. He squeezes my fingers. I watch his eyebrows knit together, then slide apart again. "I don't think we were supposed to remember things like what made me do it. You told me my name."

"Adam."

"Yeah." There's a long pause. "I feel fucking lousy. I remember the faces of everyone we were captured with—I think—but I can't remember anybody's name. Not even yours."

"I've been clean longer than you have."

"Yeah." Another pause. "Who was the short blonde with the brown eyes and the freaky tattoos?"

I laugh. I shouldn't, it hurts my throat and we're so low on water, but I can't help it. "I think that was Tommijo. Or something like that." 

"Something like that," Adam muses. "I remember him being my friend and I can't even remember his fucking name. What was _your_ name? Not that stupid fucking ID number, I mean your real name."

"I don't remember either."

Adam tugs on my hand, and I roll across the floor and into his arms, where he tightens his hold until we're so close, hip to hip and chest to chest, that I can feel his heart beating. 

"Adam," I tell him, and then I swallow because I'm _thirsty_ but I had a sip about an hour ago and we need to be careful. "We should get going."

"When it's cooler out," he protests. "The moon is big right now, we can see if we want to go in the dark." And he burrows his face into my neck, curls up against me in ways that make arguments seem not just futile but foolish, when I could lay here pressed up against him and smelling dust and sage and smoke made different by the smell of his skin. 

He shifts again and I recognise the imperative feeling tickling the back of my head, now: feel it slide down each arm and finger and slip over my back, tight in my stomach and curling up in the place his leg is pressing against me. 

He presses his lips to my jaw, and when he does I give up the idea of going back outside before dark, roll onto my back and pull him with me, feel his heart through the layers of fabric over his chest and slide my hands underneath, skin against warm skin, living breathing pulse of blood and breath moving as he moves and then we find each others' faces and

_kiss you call this kissing_

His lips are warm and taste of salt and alkali dust, and I lick a trail from their corner down to the scratch of golden-red stubble prickling up from his jaw, sweat and dust and warm and _we are alive_ , later we might not be and at some point in the past we weren't either but now we are here, I have led him out of a place that wanted us to be human robots and together we will find our way to somewhere else, and it feels so very good to hold his body, warm and moving and thinking and alive, against mine.

We lie bare together on a cool stone floor made warm by desert sun and I feel his hands in places I don't yet remember the names for, pale against dark, and I put my hands on him, remind myself that once I knew what "pleasure" meant and I can know it again, I can feel the joy and the physical whitehot bliss of his hands and his touches and his fingers locked together behind my back when we roll from one atop the other back to side by side, holding me close. 

Adam cups the back of my head with his hand and presses his lips to my face—kisses my forehead.

"Chance," he says, and I look up at him, confused.

"Chance?"

"I don't remember your name," he says, and brushes his lips over my forehead again. It's a new kind of memory, a different one, a good one, and I relish it. "But. You took a chance when you stood up to dance with me. And another one when you got me out of there, and brought us here. They were going to kill us and you gave us a second chance. So I'll call you that, until I remember." His hands again, warm and work-rough on my skin. "It doesn't sound quite right. But I think it's close."

I put my head on his chest and listen to the sound of his heart, slow and steady under my ear, and run my hands over his chest and neck and shoulders.

"We should sleep. We can walk tonight."

Adam doesn't answer, not with words. Instead he just wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me closer, and I close my eyes.

\-----------------

There are no more words.

We're both too thirsty for them. Adam's skin is red now and before we decided not to talk he told me it hurt.

I think it's sunburn. My skin hurts too.

We're walking in the dark, the moon the only thing lighting our way. An hour ago, or at least I think it was an hour, Adam stumbled. He got back up, then stumbled again, and that time he stayed down.

Now his arm is over my shoulders. We are walking, walking through the desert the way we walked out of the Facility, and I'm afraid we might die out here.

Adam rasps something, and when he does, I finally give up: lay him down on the road, sit beside him in preparation to lay down myself. There's no water, no time, and only a single multivitamin left for each of us. I take his hand and think about what little I know about him, about me, about us: His name is Adam, and he was a singer. My name was something like Chance—at least, Adam thinks it was—and I was a dancer, happy to follow where he led, eager to make people smile and laugh and enjoy. 

He made me live again and for some space of time, maybe a week or so, we lived, not as automatons running on vitamins and mind control but as _people_. We touched and kissed and got hard and held each other and talked and sometimes we laughed, even when our throats were dry, and—

—and Adam is shaking his head and pointing down the road, offering up that single dry croak again, and I put my ear to his mouth. _Us_ , I think he says, and I kiss him, lips and tongue and breath, and he shakes his head again and breathes out—

— _house._

My throat is so dry I don't think I can answer, but finally I manage to summon up enough spit to try. "Where?"

He points down the road again. I look up and—even in the dark—he's right, there it is, maybe ten minutes away if we can only make ourselves walk. And so I drag myself to my feet, first one knee, then the other, then his arm around my shoulders and I force us both to stand.

One step. Another. Another. And then there is a door.

We might die if we knock on it. The person behind it could turn us in without a qualm.

We will die if we don't. The water is long gone.

_Adam, I wasn't cut out for these kinds of decisions._

Oh but the memory of his hands roaming, curious and sweet over my skin, is fresh and wonderful and I took on a responsibility as soon as I took him from his cell.

He made me dance and then I chose my own music, and made him dance too. There is no turning my back and pretending I did anything else.

And so I knock on the door and it's opened by a woman in a red, red shirt and blue, blue jeans with bright fingernails and her hair all held up by a clip that looks like a big flower and she _can't_ sympathize with our captors, not looking like that.

Adam sags against my side and then slides down to one knee. The woman stares at us both, her mouth open. I open my own mouth to ask for water and nothing comes out.

"You're Southlanders," she finally manages, and reaches down to take Adam's hand. "Come inside."

We barely get Adam inside the door before he retches. Nothing comes out but a thin yellow string of spit, and the woman leaves us both with a word not to go anywhere—funny, kind of, because I don't think either of us have the strength to go anywhere.

Then she comes back with two glasses full of water, and after I gulp half of mine in a single swallow we try to get some water inside Adam, who groans and turns his head away. The woman gives me a helpless look.

"I've had runaways come in before, but not like this," she says, and tries to tip water into his mouth again. Adam refuses it and whines. "What's up with him?"

I think about how we left—Adam with a plastic tube still in his arm, drugged so hard he couldn't remember his own name—and about that day, three, maybe four days ago when the water was scarce but not yet gone, when we remembered, relearned, how to kiss inside a small, dark cave—and I take a sip of his water, and before the woman in the red shirt can protest I press my lips to his, and open my mouth.

He drinks from my lips like the difference between piss and wine, takes my head in his hands and pulls me closer and runs his tongue over my lips, licks water from my teeth and moans a sound that isn't exactly lust, and I pull away just long enough to take another mouthful from his glass that I can pour into his mouth, into his throat and belly and blood, ignore the woman staring at us like we've both lost our minds.

Lost them? Not hardly. What we're doing sitting on her living room floor is gaining them back. 

Adam finally pulls away from me, gasping, and rests his forehead against mine. I feel a hand on my shoulder and then the woman who rescued us is down on one knee beside us, saying something I don't understand about a "repatriation team" and "new ID cards."

"You hungry?" she asks, and I shake my head; we've been walking too long without food, with only pills, and I know it, but I can't bring myself to even think about eating. Adam just gives her a quizzical look, like he doesn't remember what "hungry" means even though we talked about it our second day out of the Facility, and she sighs and shakes her head.

"Come with me," she says, and I help Adam to his feet. The woman leads us down a short hall, then presses on what looks like a completely normal wall to show a tiny bedroom underneath the stairs.

"The Southland mostly stopped sending people after runaways last year, but I don't like chances," she tells us. "Get some sleep. I'll bring more water."

I nod, and when she leaves and the wall swings shut I push Adam's vest off his shoulders, hesitate, pull off his shirt to show pale skin in lines next to angry red. Adam lowers his head and rubs it against my hand.

"Thank you," he whispers, and I nod and finish unbuckling his jeans; whoever this woman is, she took us in when she could have left us to die and I'm pretty sure we're filthy enough to leave black marks on her sheets.

We slide together between the sheets on the bed, and Adam only whimpers a little when they touch his skin. I press my lips, gently, gently, to one of the reddest marks, on his shoulder, where burns have turned to blisters. 

We've never slept together in a bed before, at least not that I remember, and I think suddenly there are other things we could do in this bed that aren't sleeping.

Adam hooks his arms around me like that day in the cave, draped loose and his hands clasped in the small of my back, and pulls me close, kisses all over my face—cheeks and chin and nose and lips and forehead.

"Don't leave," he says, and I shift around until I'm comfortable.

"I won't."

I watch his eyes close, and his breathing lengthen, and I hope it's true.

I hope tomorrow we can start living the rest of our lives, where we don't have to be leader and follower anymore. Adam takes a deep breath and shifts around, and suddenly his eyes are open again.

"I love you, Chance."

I think about it—the disjointed memories I have from before, the clearer, more sequential ones starting with standing up on the bridge, and Adam running through almost every one.

"I love you too."

\--------------------

There's something in my arm, and what it's pouring into me is cold.

I sit up—that part is easy—and try to claw at the needle in my arm. That part doesn't happen—my arms are tied down and Adam is gone, and I'm in the process of waking up enough to panic when someone lays a gentle hand on my wrist.

"Calm down, son, it's just saline. You were so dehydrated we thought we lost you both." 

I turn my head and stare; the man sitting next to me in a blue button-down and jeans doesn't look like one of what the woman from the night before called Southlanders, but I can't be sure. Not with the needle in my arm. Then he pulls out a little leather flap and shows me an ID card.

Jensen Jameson, FBI, it says. I almost relax.

"You're back in the United States," he tells me. "Do you remember who you are?"

I think Adam told me, at some point, but I don't remember. I remember him telling me he'd call me Chance until he could remember my real name, and I tell Jensen Jameson, who just nods.

"We got some digital prints of your teeth while you were sleeping," he says. "Your real name is Terrance Spencer. It'll come back, but it might take you a few weeks. We've picked up folks from the Republic before—"

"Republic?"

"What's the last thing you remember from your old life?"

I think, think hard. "I think—"

And then I remember. Oh. _Oh._

Blushes never show up on my face that easily and this one is masked by sunburn, but it must still show somehow anyway because the FBI agent just raises his eyebrows and then nods, once, slowly.

"I was on tour," I tell him, finally, because I have to say _something._ "With Adam."

"Do you remember where you were?"

"Texas?"

He nods that slow, ponderous nod again. "There was an outbreak," he says. "Civil unrest. Not really a war. But we're down to forty-five states, and the rest of them call themselves the First People's Republic of America now. In the first thirty days we repatriated about a quarter of a million people who were in those states— _former_ states, I should say—as tourists or who were at risk of becoming repressed minorities. In the first ninety days we repatriated about three hundred thousand. All of a sudden the groups trying to get out just disappeared. You and your partner were part of that group. Another member of tour staff confirmed you were the only two missing when we got them on an airlift."

 _Partner._ I wonder if he knows what just came into my mind, if Adam's bare body in tangled sheets is part of the docket about us, when we vanished into wherever.

"Where is he?"

"We moved him to the living room. He was worse off than you. We wanted him in a hospital bed." He looks straight into my eyes, and I wonder what he sees there, if there's even a whole person left there to see. "If I untie your arms are you going to attack me?"

"Only if you attack me first." I'm not a fighter—never have been, I don't think. It must be enough for Mr. Jensen Jameson, because he just reaches out and unknots the fabric around my wrists. 

"I can take you in to see him. Might be for the best. He woke up when we first transferred him. If he wasn't so off-balance from fluid loss I'm pretty sure he would've tried to kill somebody."

He offers me a pair of soft cotton pajama bottoms—faded but clean and _not white_ , and in a way just wearing colour again is like walking out of the Facility, in a different way but oh, still so important—and after I manage to get them on and tied he leads me into the living room.

Adam is sitting in the hospital bed they provided him, crying with his arms tied to the rails and his head against his knees. Jameson crosses the room in half a dozen steps and puts a hand on his shoulder.

"Son, it's all right," he says, and when Adam tenses I follow, reach for his closer hand and lace our fingers together.

"He told me we needed fluids," I say, and Adam looks up at me, follows the line of my arm down to the IV pole still clasped in my hand where I pulled it behind me. "I think we're okay."

"It could be a trick," he answers, and I think I remember being woken from his arms once a long time ago by violence and hate and I decide there's only one way to know.

Jameson just sits quietly in the background when I sit on the edge of Adam's bed and trace his lips with my tongue, open my mouth to taste him better and pull him awkwardly closer with my free arm, and maybe Adam remembers too, because he relaxes and kisses back and then, when we finally break apart, curls up with his head on my shoulder.

"Your name is Terrance," he says. "I told you I'd remember."

"I remember other things," I answer, and Adam reaches up with one hand to pull my head down, presses his lips to my ear.

"Me too," he whispers. I find the cloth tied around his wrist and pull the knots, feel his arm wrap around me.

"Everyone is safe," he mumbles into my ear. "I think they told me that."

"That's what he told me."

"He said my mom and your mom are coming to see us. And, you know, help."

"Good."

"And we're in Colorado. We walked all the way across the Sonoran Desert."

"We can be back in LA tonight?"

"Probably not." He raises his arm and looks glumly at the IV line. Jameson clears his throat.

"Depends on how well you do, but don't count it out yet," he says. I squeeze Adam's hand.

"Can we have a few minutes? You know, alone?"

Jameson rises to his feet. "I'll go see if we can bother Quinn for some food. She's been diligent in picking up refugees over the last couple of years." He brushes his jeans down like he thinks they're dusty. "I'll be back."

And just like that he's gone, and there's just me and Adam, staring at each other as I untie his other wrist.

"We're really gonna be okay," he says, like he doesn't believe it. That's okay; I don't quite believe it myself yet either.

"We lived."

"Yeah." 

"And we're still together."

"Yeah."

I pull his hand up to my mouth and kiss it. "And . . . we're gonna remember, together. We're going to get it all back, as much as we can."

"Yeah," he agrees, and I lay my head on his hand. He turns it, runs it through my hair. "We are."

"I still love you," I finally say. "I don't think that ever ended. It just got drugged over for awhile."

And Adam raises his eyes to look at me, and for the first time on this side of our memories—since the desert, since the bridge—I see him smile, all the way up to his eyes.

"I still love you too."


End file.
